He worked for Nora.
Reed leaned against the Range Rover’s bumper, the car sagging a bit under his weight, and stared, absolutely expressionless.
Gwen turned away to face Genesai’s shack.
Nora claimed to have told her the truth about the Ofarians and Tedrans, but really, wasn’t her opinion as skewed as Gwen’s own? Maybe Genesai knew something else entirely. Maybe he was the one who knew The Truth.
And maybe, just maybe, she could use it.
She marched down the mountainside, trying to ignore the nerves twanging all over her body. Nora had called Genesai insane. What did that mean exactly? Was he dangerous?
As she stepped onto the porch, the weathered floorboards were spaced so that she could see the pitch of the cliff under her feet. She gulped and tried to focus. The creak of the shack on its stilts wasn’t helping. Clutching the strange envelope to her chest, she took two deep breaths and knocked.
A great crash erupted from inside. Pounding footsteps. She stumbled backward off the porch. Another crash, more footsteps, then the door flung open. A shirtless young man, eighteen at the most, peered out.
Pale, almost translucent skin stretched over his prominent rib cage. Brown hair shot out of his head at all sorts of lengths and angles, as though he’d taken scissors to it himself in the dark. His head twitched on his neck like a bird examining a stranger holding food. His clear, sunflower blue eyes blinked rapidly. When he looked down and saw that his toes had breached the line of sunlight from the open door, he shrieked and scrambled back into the pitch black of the cabin.
Okay. Strange, yes, but not dangerous. His Secondary signature burned hot and wavy, like the desert sun, and she was relieved to learn that nelicoda didn’t affect that part of her. The young man’s signature wasn’t at all like Nora’s and Xavier’s, which carried with them an air of unrepentant revenge and hurt. Beneath Genesai’s odd behavior there lay a line of…peace. Of innocence.
She turned to see if Reed was watching, but he was no longer visible. He wasn’t worried about her escaping apparently; the narrow path was the only way up or down. The shack or the Range Rover, her only two options.
Gwen stepped tentatively forward. “Genesai?”
“Genesai!” With a giant smile displaying rows of browned teeth, he whirled back into the shack, arms and legs flailing. She took that as an invitation to go inside, shutting the door behind her.
Two early-twentieth-century gas lanterns sat in the far corners, emitting an unfamiliar odor and just barely lighting the tiny one room. She’d been right; the windows were slathered with a messy coat of thick black paint. Squinting, she could make out a table, two chairs tipped over on their sides, a narrow bed piled with frayed blankets, and an honest-to-goodness chamber pot.
Genesai jumped straight up onto the table and gargled in the back of his throat. Gwen’s back hit the front door, but he didn’t lunge for her. He leaped through the air, the force of his body moving the table, and landed on the bed. Like a child, he bounced on the weak mattress, his face contorted with what she assumed to be glee. He shouted, but the Translation didn’t kick in so he was just making nonsensical sounds. He fell off the bed, picked himself up, and danced around the room, his knobby arms and legs wobbling like the limbs of a new colt.
Genesai started to babble, a short string of sounds that flew all around the pitch scale. They seeped into her ears and slammed into her brain. This was actual speech. She gripped the table edge, preparing for the roughest part of Translation, when all of a sudden it stopped. Not his talking, the Translation. Like a car that had driven about two feet out of park and promptly died. She realized why: he was only saying one phrase over and over and over.
“Down, down, down we come. Into fire, into water. Up, up, up we go. Together again, with blood.”
The sounds and words were too limited and her mind couldn’t complete the Translation. As Genesai bounced past, she grabbed his arms, the envelope dropping at her feet. She repeated the phrase in his language, her mouth and tongue feeling thick and heavy and tingly, like fingers regaining feeling after being numbed with ice.
Genesai’s angular face alighted. He bounced out of her grasp and she trailed behind him, anxious for him to say more. Nora said she’d been trying to communicate with him for over a century, and Gwen was on the verge of a breakthrough. It was a powerful motivator, to gain something Nora wanted and only Gwen could unlock.
But Genesai just repeated the phrase. Gwen kept saying it back to him. He squealed with joy, hyping himself up so much he started to wheeze. She could see the energy starting to drain out of him.
“Wait, Genesai. Sit down and rest.” She said it in English and Tedranish, knowing it was futile. But at least he let her guide him to the bed, where he sank with a great sigh. With each pump of his chest, she could count a new rib.
“I would very much like to talk with you,” she said in English.
For the briefest of moments, she thought he might have understood. His face turned up to her and he smiled his version of a smile. She tried not to cringe in the cloud of his breath.
“Genesai,” he whispered, and collapsed onto the bed.
His eyes rolled back in his head and his body went slack. Resonating snores filled the shack. Gwen shook him hard, called his name using the accent of his language, clapped in front of his face. No response.
Now what? Every second meant Nora crept closer to her goal of wiping out the Secondaries’ secret existence. Every second in silence was a second lost to Gwen. She couldn’t simply do nothing. When she did nothing, had nothing to say or offer, she was Nora’s puppet. Those strings needed to be cut. Gwen just had to figure out how.
The envelope the Primary guard had handed her lay where she’d dropped it by the door. Gwen snatched it up and ripped it open. What the…office stationery and crayons?
A thin stream of mountain air leaked under the door. It tickled Gwen’s legs then swirled up her body and throughout the cabin. There was movement in the corner of her eye, pale and fluttering. She turned toward the back corner, where the old lanterns still burned. Genesai’s manic movements had distracted her before, but now she saw it. Or them, rather.
Every inch of wall and ceiling space in the shack was covered with Genesai’s scribblings. Large sheets of old newspapers, ragged chunks of computer paper, painted-over coloring book pages, and torn corners of fast-food restaurant napkins. The air made the papers whisper, and Gwen moved closer to hear their secrets.
Translation had two branches: verbal and written. For the verbal, Gwen heard foreign words and absorbed them. Her brain was wired to sort everything out until the terms and grammar became as clear to her as her native tongue, and the muscles in her mouth and throat had been altered accordingly. The written part was a whole other ball of wax. It took longer, for one thing, and she had to hear the words spoken exactly as they appeared on paper in order to associate characters and combinations and punctuation with aural cues.
She only had to hear words once to remember them. She didn’t even have to hear all the words in a language to know the complete tongue, but she needed a wide sample for her mind to make the necessary connections and draw the correct conclusions. The one time she’d rushed the process had led to an embarrassing mistake and a lengthy period of groveling. She’d learned to be patient. Except when it came to Genesai.
The pages taped to the cabin’s walls held far, far more than what he’d spoken to her. She’d seen enough written languages to discern sentences and phrases, and the weird sentence he’d repeated to her had a specific cadence and used repetitive words. These wall scraps were the key to his consciousness, to communication. Nervous excitement bubbled inside her.
She moved from page to page—lifting one, sliding aside another—unsure exactly what she was looking for. Until she found it.
Ten pages of yellowed dot-matrix printer paper still tentatively attached. On it were rows upon rows of Genesai’s bizarre scrawlings, drawings of somet
hing that looked half-woman, half-spaceship, and a large body of water.
The story of his arrival. Told not by Ofarians or Tedrans.
Gasping, she whirled back to the bed, but Genesai was snoring like he was sawing the wood for his dream house, arms sticking out on either side of his bed. Had Nora seen these pages? When had he drawn it? Gwen carefully detached the long length of paper from the wall and folded it accordion-like. She opened the zipper of her cardigan sweater—where yesterday she’d stashed Xavier’s photos of the Plant—and slid Genesai’s drawings inside.
The origin of a plan—not Nora’s, not Xavier’s, but her plan—sprouted inside her.
This was why she’d been made, why she’d been chosen out of who knew how many Ofarians to be gifted that odd, elusive gene. When puberty had set in and the Translation took form alongside her water powers, the Board had dug up history on the Translators. It was a small bit of information, gleaned only from what the Translator who had first arrived on Earth had scribbled in brittle notebooks, but it was enough to know that Translators had once been the peacemakers. Made sense, really. The ones who could communicate between cultures were the ones to maintain the balance.
And now Nora wanted to use her ability as a weapon? Nothing about that seemed right.
But then, Gwen had been the one to start the international division of the Company. Turned out she had been anything but a peacemaker. She’d thought she was advancing the state of her people and solidifying their prosperity, but that was so far from the truth. She had been the one to increase the size of the Plant. She had been the one to drive them to breed more. Xavier had said they’d increased production five or six years ago. That correlated with the time she’d started up her division.
She could blame Jonah or the Board all she wanted, but she was the one who’d thrown the Company’s genocide into overdrive. And she would have to be the one to fix it. But she had to get away from Nora. She had to get back to her father.
Everything pointed back to Chairman Ian Carroway, whether he was responsible or not.
Gwen threw open the front door. She’d entered in broad daylight and now stepped out into dusk. How long had she spent examining the walls, searching for her own weapon to use against Nora? The air had gone from daytime chilly to downright frigid. Thin strips of a purple and orange sunset pierced the thick forest. As she started back up the path to the Range Rover, Reed appeared at the top.
She avoided meeting his eyes, though she did give him a once-over. His nose was red and he’d pulled a skull cap over his shaved head. He watched her intently as she skirted around the SUV and climbed in without any order or provocation.
Sitting in the passenger seat, she had to order her knees to keep from bouncing. Underneath her clothes she carried the first major clues to saving both the Tedrans and the Ofarians. Gwen had them. Not Nora. The arrogant Tedran woman could dangle the Ofarians’ demise over Gwen’s head, but Nora would only ever know what Gwen told her.
Had the old woman ever thought of that?
Gwen’s own agenda started to formulate. Whatever she was going to do, it would save the Tedrans and bring those responsible for the Plant to justice without compromising the Ofarians’ existence.
Reed climbed behind the wheel. Even though Gwen stared out the windshield, her mind racing, she felt him staring at her profile.
Yeah, this trip to meet Genesai was probably the best thing Nora could have done to help Gwen’s own scheme.
She just had to get past Reed.
NINETEEN
The Range Rover made a three-point turn and started back to the guard hut. Reed braked suddenly, throwing Gwen against her seat belt.
She calmly sat back, trying not to draw attention to the crinkle of pages between the poly-cotton blend of her sweater and her goose-bumped skin. “What?”
“I know I’m opening a can of worms with this,” he said to the steering wheel, “but I have to know. Did they hurt you in there? I heard yelling, screaming.”
She rolled her head on the seat cushion. The dashboard lights painted his face a soothing blue. His profile was as strong as his body. She tried to imagine him with hair and found it impossible. It would change too much about him, and not in a better way.
“Why, Reed. So you do care.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched the wheel. “Just answer the question.”
He wouldn’t ask if he didn’t care, right? Then again, if he cared, he might actually look at her, or put some sort of concern in his voice.
She reached forward, poked up the heat a few degrees, and turned the vent so the hot blast hit her neck. “No, they didn’t hurt me.”
He nodded once and pulled out onto the mountain road. The swerves were harder to take in the dark. She closed her eyes and ran through everything that had happened in Genesai’s shack. She was dying to take out his pages and study them.
The SUV pulled off the road and onto gravel, but it was much too soon to be back at the lake house. Opening her eyes, she saw the Range Rover’s headlights hitting a battered, wooden sign for MYRNA’S GENERAL STORE. Pine trees crowded the store on all sides, and gravel pads had been shoved between the tree trunks to serve as parking spaces. There were no other cars.
“What are we doing here?”
“I’m starving,” he said. “And your stomach’s been rumbling since we left that place.”
She sat up, heart pounding. “You’d let me out?” One phone call to her father, or one word to the store clerk, and it would be over.
“No.” He tapped the car keys. “Doors lock from the outside. Shatterproof glass.”
Of course. Such foresight.
Reed veered into the darkest parking space to the left of the store. He hopped out and hit the locks, but Gwen tried them anyway. She was tempted to try to throw her elbow through the window, too, but she knew he spoke the truth about the glass. The Tedrans had considered everything far too well.
The store was a twenties-era house, compact and dotted with small windows. GOOD HUMOR and BUD LIGHT signs dangled from the porch eaves. Inside, through the glass door, a man pushed a broom across the floor. Reed bounded up the steps and disappeared inside.
Gwen channeled the Tasmanian Devil. She turned frantic. She ran her hands over every crevice in the passenger seat, turning the space inside out, searching for anything that might help her. The glove compartment was empty, so was the center console—clean and shiny like a brand-new car. She kept one eye on the store door as she bent forward and swept her hands under her seat. She crawled over the stick shift and shoved her hands between the leather cushions. Nothing. She could scream in frustration, but it wouldn’t do any good.
A shadow flickered over the hood and she jumped, straightened. No Reed. An owl, backlit by the store lights, swooped over the moonroof and melded into the forest.
That was a precious three seconds lost. She stretched into the backseat, her fingers scraping at the floor mats. Then…there. Something small and hard and wooden stuck between the metal brackets of the driver’s seat. She plucked out the familiar shape and tucked it underneath her thigh closest to the door.
A pencil. One of those tiny ones used on golf courses.
A bell chimed and Reed stepped out of the store carrying a small plastic bag and a liter of Coke. Inside, the storekeeper switched off the neon signs and flipped over the CLOSED placard.
“They didn’t have much,” Reed said, sliding behind the wheel. “Apple muffin okay?”
Her stomach growled in response. She thought she saw his mouth twitch, but she could have been wrong. “I guess I am hungry. Thanks.”
Was her voice too loud? Did she respond too quickly or too enthusiastically? All of a sudden the heat in the car was too much and she punched it down a few notches.
Digging into the bag, she pulled out the muffin, but she also found what she needed even more. A white napkin. As Reed pulled back out onto the road, she fumbled with the noisy plastic wrap and stuffed the napkin under her thi
gh next to the pencil.
Reed drove with one hand and shoved pretzels into his mouth with the other. He kept his eye on the zigzagging road while she scarfed down the muffin. When she was finished, she focused on balancing the napkin on the seat edge, out of his sight. He’d given her an opening and she damn well was going to take it.
She held the pencil with shaking fingers. The napkin was flimsy and the pencil tip tore through several times as she tried to find the perfect pressure. Reed crunched pretzels and gulped Coke next to her. Darkness cloaked them both, but she managed to scrawl: Kidnapped: Gwen Carroway, San Francisco. Call Ian Carroway. And her father’s private number. If someone called the cops instead, the Ofarian moles would be tasked with erasing any evidence. It was a chance she had to take.
She balled up the napkin in her fist and held it like a raw egg, precious and fragile. She held it all the way back down the mountain and into the busy, commercial area immediately surrounding the lake.
Not many people out at this hour, but as they sped past a gas station lined with cars, she smacked the automatic window button. Her hand flew up to toss out the napkin. She opened her mouth to scream.
The part of her half-assed plan she hadn’t considered? That not only did the doors not open, but neither did the windows.
Reed’s reflexes were like a fly’s: one of those nasty buggers who senses a swat and jumps away. He reached across the cab and snatched her hand before she realized the window never even cracked open.
The Range Rover swerved. Reed took back control, but he overcompensated and the SUV fishtailed. It skidded across the empty opposite lane, bounced over the shoulder and into a patch of grass. He slammed on the brakes. The SUV slid to a halt. A tree rose not two feet off the front bumper.
Had someone from the gas station seen? Were they now running over to see if anyone was hurt? Gwen could only hope so, and turned in her seat to see.
Liquid Lies Page 16