Liquid Lies

by Hanna Martine

  Gwen smiled. Reed held his breath.

  “That’s what you think.” She lifted her foot and kicked back, hard, into Jonah’s injured leg. Jonah howled, the knife tumbling from his hand and clattering to the asphalt. He reached for the wound, his body buckling.

  “Bitch!” Jonah spit.

  Gwen wheeled away, putting space between her and the two Board members.

  Reed charged into the opening, propelled by intense pride. He leaped onto Jonah, knocking him backward, one boot pressing Jonah’s arm into the ground. The other foot kicked the knife under the van with such force it skittered out on the other side. He aimed his gun right at Jonah’s heart.

  “Don’t move, Chairman,” Griffin said.

  Reed looked over his shoulder to see Griffin holding Gwen’s father at point-blank range. But the Chairman’s defeated, murderous eyes clung to Reed.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” Reed said to the Chairman. “I’m Gwen’s.”

  The Chairman started to shake with fury. “You’re Gwen’s what?”

  Reed grinned. “I’m just hers.”

  And there it is, said Reed’s ice blue eyes. It’s yours to do with as you please, even if it destroys me.

  He actually believed, Gwen realized, that she’d destroy him on her way to getting what she wanted. That was her own fault, for approaching him in the lake house the way she had.

  Wrenching her focus from Reed, she closed in on the Chairman. She had to view him as that right now, because to think of him as her father, as the man who’d taught her how to hit baseballs in the park and played Barbies with her without protest, she wouldn’t get anywhere.

  Sometime between their confrontation in the manor and now, he’d dosed himself with Mendacia. The forty-something man she barely knew watched her with fearful anticipation. She pulled from her pocket the most powerful weapon on that battlefield: the cell phone Griffin had given her on top of the hill.

  Raising the phone to the Chairman’s eye level, she pushed on. The photo that came up, bright and disgusting, made him gasp.

  She looked over her shoulder at Griffin, who nodded solemnly. The morning before the Board meeting, she’d secretly left the photos—the ones he’d denied in the diner—on his bed, in a place he couldn’t ignore, hoping for his compassion to kick in. And it had. He’d come through for her spectacularly.

  “Photos inside the Plant,” she said. Thumbing through the barrage of awful images, she lowered the phone and slowly walked back and forth in front of the Ofarian soldiers. “Imprisoned Tedrans. Drained of their powers. Dying before their time. Forced to procreate to increase inventory.”

  Xavier leaned heavily against the giant wheel of the semi. His ashen face was half buried in the crook of his elbow. When her gaze met his tortured eyes, he closed his so tightly his eyelashes disappeared.

  Many Ofarians leaned closer to the ghastly images. Most grimaced. All murmured in shock.

  “How did you…” the Chairman began, crimson staining through his glamour. He couldn’t even finish. Him, the man who could bullshit his way out of a Colombian prison.

  Gwen moved to stand between him and Jonah. She couldn’t tell if the Chairman’s Mendacia spell was actually fading, or if his true, aging self was pushing through in his time of exposure. Either way, she glimpsed his real face, wrinkled and spotted. Desperate. Hurt. Livid. His sagging, reddened eyes glared like a dragon’s, but she wasn’t remotely afraid of his fire. Two weeks ago, maybe. But not now. Not ever again.

  “I’m sending these to every Ofarian,” she told him.

  “No,” he breathed. “For us. For your people. Don’t.”

  “They deserve to know.”

  Jonah’s hand, the one not trapped by Reed’s boot, clawed for Gwen’s shin. Reed flexed his thighs, crouched down, and pressed the barrel of his gun to the Vice Chairman’s forehead.

  “Do what you have to do, Gwen,” Reed said.

  Her finger hovered over the phone’s send button. She wanted the Chairman to watch her every movement.

  He stretched out a hand, his voice trembling. “Think about what you’re doing, Gwennie. What it will mean to all of us. To everyone who depends on Mendacia.”

  “I have.” She met his pleading eyes dead on. “And the difference between you and me is that I have deep enough faith in my people that we will be able to grow and prosper without it. I believe we will be able to find our individual ways in the Primary world and not be so dependent on one such thing as this. I believe in the future, not the past.”

  She couldn’t have made this move any earlier, though her trigger finger had itched. If she’d blasted the Ofarians with the images the second Griffin had handed her the phone, the guards in the caravan would have received them, turned the vehicles around, and disappeared with the Tedrans and the product. Waiting had killed her, but it had paid off.

  She pressed send.

  The Chairman crumpled forward, hands braced on his knees.

  She liked to think that she could feel the weight of that message launch from the phone. She liked to think she saw its power rise from the constraints of circuits and plastic, fly over her head, and search out each and every one of her people. The ultimate truth bearer.

  Various ringtones chimed throughout the Ofarian crowd huddled at her feet. Some soldiers reached into their vests to get another look at the proof she offered. Some just let their phones sit, the evidence too awful to see more than once.

  And she wasn’t done yet.

  Her thumbs danced across the phone’s keypad. “Now I’m telling all our clients the Company has folded and Mendacia production has been shut down.”

  The Chairman exploded back to life. “No!” He lunged.

  Reed wheeled off Jonah, charging to intercept the Chairman’s attack. Jonah took full advantage, scrambling to his feet and diving for Gwen’s arm holding the phone.

  The same enemy with the same purpose. Two assaults. Two angles.

  Two gunshots.

  She screamed, the surrounding hills throwing back the sound in screeching echo.

  Jonah fell smack to the pavement, face first. A flower of blood bloomed aggressively on his back.

  A half-second later her father collapsed to his knees, gasping. He clutched at his shoulder where blood seeped across his pin-striped Italian suit. Then his ass hit the ground. She’d never seen him look so small or so lost.

  “Dad,” she began, but all her words ran out, because that was who he was again—her father—and the enormity of the space between them became achingly apparent. He closed his eyes, hissing through his pain.

  Jonah Yarbrough’s body twitched, then went utterly still. Beneath him, blood turned the asphalt to glittering ebony.

  She looked at Reed, who held up his hands and shook his head. Together, they swiveled to Griffin.

  Griffin’s gun was still outstretched, death reflected in his dark features, his eyes black orbs. Gwen stumbled over to him. “Hey,” she said, pressing down his gun arm then prying the weapon from his fingers.

  “Stars,” he murmured. “I shot them.” He blinked and shook his head as though waking from a dream. “Gwen, I’m so sorry. I should’ve known the Chairman was setting a trap when he sent me away on that shit job. I should’ve guessed.”

  “Don’t. We both should’ve known.”

  “Headlights!” David called from his position on the slope.

  The Chairman’s reinforcements. More Ofarians, whose phones had also gone off moments ago.

  “Guys.” Reed trotted up. “What next?”

  She scanned the length of the caravan. “We’re taking everything with us. The vehicles, the Mendacia, everything.” She’d figure out what the hell to do with it later, it just couldn’t be left there. “Except the guards. They stay.”

  Griffin snapped his fingers at one of his men and ordered him to load all the Mendacia boxes into one of the drivable SUVs.

  “I’ve got the semi,” Reed said.

  She did
a double take. “You can drive a semi?”

  His small smile hinted at the dimple. “Where to?”

  She looked to the southwest. “The lake.”

  Griffin radioed Sam in the pickup truck atop the hill. “Lake Tahoe. Bring Genesai.”

  Reed jogged for the semi and Gwen watched him go, amazed he was still here. Amazed he’d remained on their side, even after Griffin had locked him up and she’d kept him there.

  Griffin went to the Chairman and bound his hands. The nelicoda-laced bullet and the wound it had inflicted might keep him from trying to run, but Gwen didn’t blame Griffin for being extra careful. Still, the sight of her father, injured and defeated and shackled, destroyed the image of the hero she’d created over her lifetime.

  A very small part of her wanted to apologize to him. She got over that really fast. “We have a lot more to say to one another,” she told him. But the prospect of that made her heartsick. He lifted his chin in his signature gesture, and for the first time in her life, she didn’t bristle under his intense look of disappointment.

  “I still love you, Dad, despite all this. And I did the right thing.”

  “I love you, too, kiddo,” he whispered. Or maybe she just heard it in her head, because she wanted to.

  She went to stand next to Griffin, who was checking on the disabled Ofarians. She lifted her voice to address everyone. “Backup is on its way. They’ll help you because they’re Ofarians, and if they don’t, they’ll answer to me. I want the Chairman taken into custody and all remaining members of the Board arrested. As protector to the Translator and security liaison to the Board, I give Griffin seniority over all Ofarian soldiers.”

  Griffin picked up her cue and pointed at the slope behind him. “Two of your own have fallen. Don’t forget them. And do not let the Chairman’s backup go after Gwen. Let her do what she has to do.”

  Gwen turned to watch the last of the Mendacia being transferred from the van to an SUV, when one of the Ofarian caravan guards grabbed her hand.

  “It’s true, isn’t it.” He breathed hard; he’d taken a hit high in the thigh. “You didn’t make this up. These photos are real.”

  It was like going back in time, stepping outside her body and looking into her own face the day Xavier had dragged her through the Plant.

  “I wish it weren’t true,” she said. “But it is.”

  The soldier sank into himself, eyes dropping to his blood spattered on the road shoulder.

  She lifted her face to the semi, Reed poised behind the huge steering wheel.

  Griffin touched her arm. “You want to ride with him?”

  “Not with Reed. With the Tedrans. They need to know what’s happened. What’s going to happen.”

  He nodded tightly. “Then go. Hurry.”

  The headlights of the Ofarian backup drew closer and closer. Even with Griffin’s orders to stand down, who knew what they’d do when they saw the injured Chairman. Gwen needed to get the hell out of there.

  She ran for the back of the semi and pulled up when she saw Xavier propped heavily against the trailer, the events of that night clearly riding high and hard on his back.

  “I saw everything.” His voice was full of wonder, full of regret. “You…you…”

  “No time for that,” she said, stealing Reed’s words. “Boost me up. I’m sending you home.”

  FORTY

  The semi-trailer was cold despite the press of hundreds of bodies around her. To stave off claustrophobia, Gwen talked the length of the bumpy ride. No one else said a word. She spoke in Tedranish, outlining her whole story, leaving nothing out. Above everything, the Tedrans deserved honesty. It was too dark inside the trailer to gauge their reactions. Nora stood somewhere in the mass, but wherever she was, she remained quiet.

  Xavier wedged himself through the crowd, unlocking neutralizer handcuffs one by one, and the floor became luminescent with tiny green lights. The Tedrans stood there, confused. They didn’t know what to do with their freedom. They had no idea that, as soon as they were well away from the neutralizer magic, the glamour was now theirs to command as they willed.

  When the truck finally stopped, the Tedrans pushed Gwen to the door. The back rolled up and this time it was Reed on the ground and her inside. He looked up at her, extended a hand, and helped her down.

  The moment her feet hit the ground, he tugged his hand from hers. The expression on his face was maddeningly blank. She owed him a zillion explanations, none of which she could give now.

  Xavier hopped down next, and together the three of them helped the Tedrans out of the truck.

  The semi had braked diagonally across an empty harbor parking lot on the shore of Lake Tahoe. A sign at the lot entrance read: NO PARKING BETWEEN 2 AND 6 A.M. It was closing in on three, and the parking spaces were all taken up by milling, nervous Tedrans.

  It had been beyond difficult to try to explain the concept of a spaceship, let alone a lake, to people who’d never even seen the stars. Now the Tedrans huddled together in a wide-open space, pointing at mundane things like road signs and bushes. Some cried, bemoaning the loss of walls. It was close to freezing outside, and none had been in a temperature other than seventy-two degrees.

  One third of them were children. None, save for Nora, was elderly. Many of the teenage girls were pregnant.

  Xavier swept around the outside of the group, murmuring reassuring words, trying to keep the group calm. Telling them to trust Gwen.

  She heard him ask several women if they knew which kids they’d made together. The women only shook their heads, looking as lost as he. But by gazing over the towheads and the taller ones, Gwen could take a pretty good guess. She sincerely hoped they’d figure it out.

  Gwen finally caught sight of Nora in the throng. She was holding children’s hands, smiling, smoothing hair. Whatever misguided plans Nora might have had, she was still a leader. She still wanted her people to be happy and free. So had Ian Carroway.

  Adine milled around, too, speaking Tedranish to confused adults, but looking overwhelmed and unsure herself.

  Reed stood alone, off to the side, but she instead went for Griffin and David, who were hopping out of the SUV that held all the Mendacia.

  “We need a boat,” she told them. “I don’t care if we have to make a million trips in a dinghy. Just get something.”

  “I’ll handle that,” Griffin said. To David he ordered, “Take the SUV that doesn’t have the Mendacia and get the rest of our guys back to San Francisco. You’re on point for going after the Board. I also want anyone and everyone associated with the Plant—doctors, guards, fucking janitors—and I want it done yesterday.”

  David nodded and went off without question. The pickup truck carrying Genesai swerved into the lot. Sam killed the engine, hopped into the SUV with David and the others, and it sped south.

  “They’re leaving?” Xavier said quietly, just behind her.

  She glanced at Griffin, who was already halfway across the lot, heading for the very few remaining boats tethered to the harbor cans. She just realized what he’d done.

  “Yes,” she said to Xavier. “It’s better this way. The last thing your people need is a bunch of Ofarians circling them, telling them what to do.”

  Xavier sighed, and the sound was saturated with gratitude and relief.

  She looked at the expanse of weathered wood stretching out into the black, choppy water. “I need everyone on the dock. Reed?” She turned to find he’d edged closer, arms across his chest.

  “Yes?” That voice, with no challenge, sank deep into her bones.

  “Can you help get everyone to the docks?”

  She’d explained to the Tedrans that Reed was a harmless Primary, so they listened as he started to guide them across the road. Xavier moved to follow but Gwen took his arm and held him back. “I need your help, too. But with something else.”

  She told him what she needed. He nodded and disappeared into the crowd.

  Genesai still sat in the pickup, hands sp
layed on the glass, staring out at the water. She rushed to the vehicle and opened the door. Off balance, he tumbled out and hit the ground in a pile of awkward limbs. She lifted him to his feet, looped her arm through his elbow, and said, “Come with me. I’m about to bring up your ship.”

  She and the pilot pressed through the crowd of Tedrans until they came to the very end of the dock. Genesai shook with anticipation.

  Xavier was already there, standing at the head of a line of seven Tedrans. Of all the Tedrans present, those seven looked the oldest and healthiest. Xavier nodded to her. All was ready on his end.

  Reed stood to her right. Slowly she turned to him. His chin dipped low. Those intense eyes didn’t blink as they searched her face.

  “I didn’t want to bring you into this,” she said. “I really didn’t.”

  He clenched his jaw hard.

  “You said I used you. Maybe I did. And I’m sorry. So very, very sorry.”

  “Gwen, I know—”

  “No, you don’t know. Not all of it. There shouldn’t be any more secrets between us. You said…you said you were mine. So you should know exactly who’s laying claim to you.”

  With that, she inched backward, heels poised over the edge of the dock, and whispered Ofarian words.

  The magic swept up from her toes, transforming her body part by part to shimmering water. The last thing she saw before she let go of her bodily mold and splashed into the cold lake was Reed’s wide eyes and the exaggerated O of his mouth.

  Gwen didn’t need Adine’s submarine or her fancy instruments or her enviable memory to find Genesai’s ship again.

  Deep under the lake’s surface, she expanded her water body into a thin net of droplets. She opened herself to the lake’s voice, and it was as welcoming as the embrace of a dearest friend—the one who’d never judge or abandon. She’d been so worried, when the Tedrans had kept making her take nelicoda, that the drug would permanently damage her magic and she’d never again get to feel her liquid self slide through water. Truly, there was nothing like it.

  She tested her surroundings, asking the water to tell her where the ship lay. The response came in vibrations that drifted across her liquid body, describing disturbances and outlining the placement of rocks and wildlife and sunken boats.