Liquid Lies (29 page)

“The something-like-that boyfriend. Will you go back to him?”

Unexpected tears pricked at her eyes but she repressed them. “That was over the moment Nora told me what this was all about.”

Reed exhaled in obvious relief. There was a little tremble to his breath and it got to her. The tears gained some ground.

“I want to show you where I live,” he said. “I think you’d like it. When you asked me where it was, I wanted to tell you. It’s always been easy to lie about it, but not to you.”

“Scared to trust me?”

He bent to touch his forehead to hers. “Scared of how I feel about you.”

If the growing darkness had given him courage to ask such a thing, it gave her the courage to cry over him in his presence. She felt the tears leak out and sniffled.

“Hey,” he said, wiping them away with his thumbs. “If things are rough for you when this is over, I can…I can make you disappear. I can make
us
disappear. I’m kind of good like that.”

He laughed nervously, which brought on a new rush of silent tears.

“I know it’s strange to hear. Hell, it’s beyond strange to say. It doesn’t have to be next week or even next month. It could be next year, though the wait might kill me. Just as long as you come. There’s something about us, Gwen. I’m not ready to let it go.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him to her. Hard. She kept shifting her grip, because no way to hold him was strong or tight enough. He’d just told her exactly what she didn’t know she wanted to hear, and she could extract no joy from it.

She felt him exhale. Felt him smile against her neck.
Oh, God
. He thought she’d just agreed.

“Reed.” She pushed against him. “It can’t happen.”

It destroyed her to say it.

He stiffened, his chest halting mid-breath. He rolled off her.
Wait
, she was dying to say.
I didn’t mean that.
He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, elbows to knees. Pale light lay a white blanket across his broad shoulders, bunched near his ears.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said to the floor.

She owed him an explanation. By opening his heart and translating what it said, he’d earned a reason. But she couldn’t give him one.

He feared the Tedrans would kill her. He’d stayed on to make sure they didn’t, but he didn’t know that what they had planned for her was worse than death. He could never know. He had to go on believing in his system of checks and balances. He had to think that what he thought he knew about Adine would save his ass. If he knew his information was worthless, that Gwen really was in danger, he’d turn on the Tedrans so fast they’d bring up the U.S. government on speed dial and all would be lost.

Both he and Nora thought they held the better hand, and Gwen was relying on that stasis. Any disturbance in the current waters would upset the progress she’d made with Genesai. Any disturbance could destroy her chance to formulate her own plan. Any disturbance could set Nora off.

Besides, even if Gwen were to live through this and her culture retained its power, she couldn’t ever be with a Primary.

None of it mattered anyway. If Reed learned who and what Gwen was, he’d take back all he just said and run the other way. She didn’t think her heart would survive that.

Crawling across the bed, she slipped her arms around his waist and laid her head against his strong back. The need to constantly touch him was more potent than a heroin itch. Another name, Johnny Einhoven, threaded its way through the vines just beyond her nose. She wanted to know every fraction of every inch of his tattoo. What it all meant to him. How it had shaped him.

She never would, though, and she had to accept that sooner rather than later.

“I want to go with you. I want you to make us disappear,” she said. He tilted back his head, exhaled, and slid his hands over hers. “That’s no more crazy than you asking. It just can’t happen.”

“I understand. You don’t have to say any more.”

His watch jolted alive. When he raised his wrist, she saw the message, plain as day.

Bring her to the north garden. NOW.

The tiny garden north of the garage abutted a steep rise of
rock that extended out into the water and became the promontory. A circular, brick path surrounded a dry fountain made of a pyramid of stones. It reminded Gwen of the enchanted fountain at Company HQ, but without the water running over it, it looked incomplete and lonely and made her long for her power.

Xavier stood on the far side of the fountain, next to a patch of blooming mums intermixed with withering plants at the end of their season. Small solar lamps threw weak circles of light around the little garden.

Reed took up position by the door into the house, leaning against the wall and staring out to the lake. Gwen walked to Xavier, who watched her approach with his arms behind his back. They hadn’t been alone since the day he’d bared himself to her in the Plant.

He looked as cold and dry as the fountain.

“Are we waiting for Nora?” she asked Xavier in Tedranish.

“No.”

“
You
called me out here?”

He just stared. She flashed a worried look at the door. At Reed. Too late she realized her mistake.

Xavier stepped between them, filling her vision. Accusatory eyes bored into her. “Why are you looking at him?”

“I wasn’t…I just thought…where’s Nora?” What the hell was going on? Was he accusing her of something? Or was he just trying to make her squirm?

“Still at the Plant. I came back with Adine. It’s a mess there. The Tedrans…she’s trying to reassure them, but it’s hard to work around the guards’ shifts and they have days, hours even, to understand when I had months…” He shook his shaggy head to clear his mumbling. “Tell me you spoke to Genesai.”

She lied. She lied even as Genesai’s language bubbled and grew inside her brain, and the bold strokes of his written words danced in her mind’s eye. Xavier listened to it all with an unreadable face.

She had no plan of her own yet. She only knew that she couldn’t tell Xavier the truth.

He crossed his arms and looked at her down his long nose. The garden lights made his pale, wavy hair into a halo. “You’re lying.”

“If I’m lying, I’m murdering a member of my own family and locking the rest of my people in a cage. You understand that, right?”

That’s exactly what she’d be doing. Playing with everyone’s lives like dice.

“What I understand is that you’re very clever.” Before she had time to process that, to think of a reaction or a retort, he blurted out, “You and the Primary spend a lot of time alone.”

She tried not to trip over her stomach as it dropped to the gravel.

He leaned down, way too far into her space. “You’re upstairs a lot.”

To step back would scream guilt, to announce her weakness for Reed. “What are you saying?”

“What do you think I’m saying?”

She leaned so close to Xavier their noses almost touched. She jabbed an angry finger at Reed. “That man
kidnapped
me. He stole my life. He locks me in that room upstairs and keeps the entire world out of my reach. He’s like a wall, Xavier. You think I want to have a conversation with him, let alone what you’re insinuating?”

Xavier’s wide eyes held hers in a long, uncomfortable stare
.

“Are you trying to turn him?” he asked.

“
Turn
him? Didn’t you hear what I said before? No matter what I do, my people are fucked. I can’t win. There’s nothing for me to turn him toward or against! How many times do I have to say it?”

And that was the absolute truth. She had nothing to give, nothing to work toward of her own.

He straightened to his full height and inhaled thinly through his nose. He didn’t look convinced. Her only hope was to swerve his mind down a different road, get it away from Reed.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Which is more important to you: freeing the slaves or getting off Earth?”

Disgust curled his lip. “They’re one and the same.”

“No. No, they’re not. Not to Nora. Not in the idea of hers you endorsed.”
There
. A flicker of doubt in his
Mendacia
silver eyes. She charged on. “You told me to make a choice. If I go along with the Genesai plan, the Tedrans will return to your home planet. If I plant a bomb in Company HQ during the weekly Board meeting and then go after the Plant workers, the Tedrans will be free, but they’ll still live here on Earth. I’m asking you, Xavier, which would
you
prefer?”

He was a tortured, bitter man who viewed her as a representative of the people he hated most. He answered exactly as she expected.

“Above anything, I want justice. I want the Ofarians to acknowledge what they’ve done, that it’s wrong. I want them to pay for their crimes.”

“The Ofarians who are responsible for
Mendacia
, you mean.”

His coolly handsome face twisted into something wild and vicious. “Aren’t all of them?”

Her own ferocity rose to match his. “I had no idea what was happening until you took me into the Plant. You saw my reaction. Meryl Streep couldn’t have faked that. I understand your plight, Xavier. I honestly do; it makes me ill to know what I’ve been a part of. What I don’t understand is why I have to be the one to bring your revenge on my own people. I don’t understand why
I
have to make this choice.”

His wide shoulders lifted in the tiniest of shrugs. “Because you’re the Translator.”

A goddamn gene mutation in the Ofarian makeup that came randomly every couple of generations. It made her want to rip out her own tongue.

At last she looked away from Xavier, down to her feet. She didn’t want to see his smugness any longer.

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?” she finally said. “I mean, I have to help you no matter what happens. And if you’re okay with the outcome, if you truly have no preference, it really is up to me, isn’t it?”

When he didn’t answer, she moved back a few steps. They’d earned a bit of distance, and Xavier exhaled in obvious relief. His shoulders and hands relaxed. She thought back to the Plant, how the Circle had affected him, how he couldn’t even stand to be attached to her by four feet of chain. Even now, he glared back at the house, chin jutted out.

“I know you would never say it, Xavier, but you depend on me. And you would never, ever admit it, but you place hope in me.” That brought his head back around, but what she saw in his eyes wasn’t anger. It was shock. And maybe a bit of truth. “I understand why you say the things you do to me. Why you treat me this way. I also know I’ll never change your opinion of me until I fulfill what you brought me here for.”

“If you betray us”—his harsh whisper magnified the wet chill in his stare—“if you keep my people in slavery, I swear on the stars that I will see every last one of your kind die. And you will be the last.”

She planted her feet, laced her fingers, palms down, in the Ofarian prayer fashion meant to resemble water, and vowed in the Ofarian language: “I promise you I will free the slaves.”

“What?” he snapped at the sound of her mother tongue.

Keeping her hands together, she repeated the oath in Tedranish.

He softened, even if only a fraction, then turned on his heel and stalked toward the house. As he passed Reed, Reed came forward without acknowledging the surly Tedran. Reed barely glanced at her as he took up position on the opposite side of the fountain.

A stone bench curved behind her knee and Gwen sank onto it, her back to the house and to Reed.

She replayed everything she’d said to Xavier. How she would do as the Tedrans said because she literally had no other options. Even if she continued to hide her communication with Genesai, it wouldn’t do anything to free the slaves or lift her people from their dependence on
Mendacia
. What she’d told Nora and Xavier the other day was absolutely true: there were other ways she could remedy all that had been done wrong. But to free the Tedrans, punish the responsible Ofarians, and maintain the Secondaries’ secret existence, she couldn’t be in the lake house. She was trapped here. Except…what if she wasn’t…

The seed of a plan nestled itself deep in her brain. She could see inside it, see how it would sprout, know what it would grow into. But the seed was broken and a few bits and pieces floated around in the ether, waiting for her to connect them. She needed glue, a bonding agent. Something—or some
one
—to bring it all together.

Behind her, Reed’s subtle movements created photo-quality images in her mind. She closed her eyes and listened. As he shifted on his feet, his heavy boots moved dirt and tiny stones over brick. That deep
shush
was the sound of his denim-clad thighs rubbing together. He adjusted his neck in a small series of cracks. His arms were crossed and he drummed his fingers on his forearms.

That silence in between? That was him watching her. The very weight of it made her sag. Even in the chill of the evening, she could sense its heat.

Her head dropped, dread filling her fast.